Another hidden gotcha... "Note: If your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted."

OUCH... I know other web mail services do this as well but picture this senario (unlikely I know)... You spend 2 years uploading GB's of photos to Flickr (because you are shy you keep these all private) you are hit by a bus and knocked into a coma... while you are "asleep" your Pro account expires you wake up 4 months later with little memory of the past. Your friend reminds you that you upload your photos to flickr so you go back to flickr hoping to be automatically logged in and "relive" your life through your photos... instead "sorry your account has been deleted... bummer!".

I actually jumped back into Flickr over the weekend to sign-up for another year... I was feeling a little bereaved but not enough to stop using the service.

When I hit the homepage I got this message...

"Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,On March 15th we'll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr."

Bugger... Now I need to be counted as a Yahoo mail user as well! I guess it had to happen and we do the same with passport (Live ID) but up to now I have avoided it looks like I have to bring all of my 5 Old Skool flickr accounts over as well!

When are we as a community at large solve this "Attention Data" issue (yes I know MSFT is not without blame here as well).

did you read the yahoo terms of service -- you agreed to *read* your yahoo mail too!

Steven Quick

27 Feb 2007 1:01 AM

Sounds like the perfect opportunity to roll your own simple photo storage web site, imo :). I've been looking into this recently and you could leverage Amazon S3 storage with ease (actually some players already do eg: smug mug). It's comical like 0.15c/GB for data and 0.20c/GB for bandwidth a month.